Authorities hope one murder holds key to another

June 15, 2014|By Dan Hinkel and Steve Mills, Tribune reporters

Holly Staker

A DNA match has given new life to the troubled investigation into Holly Staker's 1992 rape and murder, and Lake County authorities are trying to solve her killing by reinvestigating a crime committed nearly a decade later.

Attorneys revealed in court last week that DNA suggested the same person may have been involved in both the Staker murder and the slaying of Delwin Foxworth, who was beaten and lit on fire in North Chicago in 2000. A lab report showed a link between semen from the Staker scene in Waukegan and blood on a board used to beat Foxworth in North Chicago.

The man connected to the DNA has not been identified, but the genetic evidence doesn't match the original defendant in either case. Juan Rivera spent 20 years in prison for Staker's killing before a state appeals court freed him; Marvin Williford's lawyers argue the new DNA tests clear him of Foxworth's murder.

Now, Waukegan police — tasked with solving Staker's murder since Rivera's release in 2012 — are trying to use witnesses and information from the Foxworth killing to solve the earlier murder, said Lake County State's Attorney Mike Nerheim. Prosecutors hope that detective work might also illuminate facts in Foxworth's case and help determine how they should handle Williford's innocence claim, Nerheim added.

"Any information they get that's relevant to either case … we'll certainly take action," Nerheim said.

Meanwhile, one of Rivera's former lawyers and a forensic science expert agreed that because DNA database searches have failed to identify a suspect, authorities should use DNA to try to find one of the killer's relatives and use that to track down the suspect. Illinois doesn't use that controversial technique, called familial searching, though officials said the method is under review.

Williford, arrested three years after the crime, hopes to be cleared like four men who were exonerated by DNA in Lake County in the last years of former State's Attorney Michael Waller's term. Under Waller, the office earned a reputation for disregarding evidence showing prosecutors had imprisoned the wrong men while dangerous criminals went free.

Foxworth was beaten with a board and set on fire in his home in 2000, and prosecutors depended on a witness who said Williford, now 43, wielded the board and dumped gasoline on the victim before he was set on fire. Williford, who has maintained his innocence, was convicted and sentenced to 80 years in prison.

Foxworth's mother, Ann Adams, said she took a call in recent weeks from a Waukegan officer investigating the Staker case. The officer wanted to know about her son's associates, whom she said she didn't know. Foxworth did not succumb to his injuries for two years, and when Adams asked her son about the attack during that time, she said he told her, "Mom, stay out of it."

Authorities have also been in contact with Williford's lawyers but have not asked to speak with the inmate. The lawyers are providing leads on potential alternative suspects to authorities.

"The DNA hit in our case gives new life to the Staker murder, but it also supports an argument that my client is innocent and had nothing to do with either offense. In light of that, I hope police are independently investigating both cases instead of relying upon a false assumption that my client is guilty or connected in any way with the real murderer of Holly Staker," said Jennifer Blagg, one of Williford's attorneys.

While the DNA match has offered police direction in the unsolved Staker case, prosecutors are reviewing what it could mean to the Foxworth case. Nerheim was elected state's attorney in 2012 promising to reform an office whose prosecutors dismissed and even ridiculed claims of innocence that turned out to be valid. He said he'd consider every possibility.

"It could mean any number of things. It could mean Williford is innocent, it could mean there is a tie to one of the (other men involved) in that case," he said.

Waukegan police declined to comment.

While major developments in the Staker case have been driven by forensic science, one of Rivera's lawyers and a DNA expert lamented that authorities apparently are not using one emerging forensic technique — familial DNA searching.

A familial search can be done when authorities — finding no DNA match to a suspect in a database — search for potential family members of the offender, allowing follow-up investigation that might lead to the criminal. Critics of familial DNA searching have voiced concern that it is imprecise and it could lead to invasions of privacy.

Only a handful of states do familial searches; Illinois does not. Illinois State Police spokeswoman Monique Bond said her agency recognizes the technique's potential but noted the controversy and said the method is under review.

Familial searching makes sense in a cold case such as the Staker investigation, said Rockne Harmon, a DNA expert. Harmon, a former prosecutor in Alameda County, Calif., who helped prosecute O.J. Simpson, noted California's Grim Sleeper case, in which authorities found the son of a man whose DNA was allegedly discovered at various crime scenes and used that to locate the man now charged with killing 10 women.

Judy Royal, a lawyer at Northwestern University Law School's Center on Wrongful Convictions who helped defend Rivera, said she'd like to see a familial search on the DNA sample done in Wisconsin because of its proximity to Waukegan and because the state recently authorized familial searches.